Did you know that the largest Robot Museum in Europe is located beneath the Juegetronica games store in central Madrid? When I first stumbled across this interesting bit of robo news I was a little surprised that a continent as technology conscious as Europe would have its biggest robot museum in the basement of a store. In this country we have museums featuring robots in nearly every major city. Most appear sponsored by various universities like The Robotics Institute (RI), a division of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We even have them in out-of-the-way but well-known entertainment parks like Wisconsin Dells, deep in the Wisconsin countryside.
I needn't have worried: first of all the Juegetronica is not just some small game shop in a Madrid strip mall-- online images display a game store on steroids; secondly, the owner of the Madrid Robot Museum further described his place as "perhaps the only dedicated robot Museum in Europe outside of universities and training centers where we can see this technology of the future." Which is to say the museum is independent of any big European institution. Maybe a bit like our own Wisconsin Dells? And like Wisconsin Dells, it is a big f
avorite with kids.
Image from the museum courtesy of Arab News https://www.arabnews.com/news/485051 was removed
No wonder. They have the biggest selection of AIBO robots (AIBO is the soccer playing robot dog) outside of AIBO’s native Japan. AIBO renowned soccer play is only matched by his amazing ability to act like a real dog. Watch some videos of this little robot and wonder at how he responds when petted on the head.
What we robot lovers of the world find so exciting about places like this independent museum is that they show the increasing importance of robots in our lives and to our cultures.
A museum, after all, is defined as a building in which objects of historical, scientific, artistic, or cultural interest are stored and exhibited. We are thrilled to discover that robots--long objects of passionate interest to us--are viewed the same way by many others worldwide.
